Great Place to Work® and Fortune Announce 2016 Best Workplaces for Parents

Great Place to Work

12 December 2016

These leading companies offer all-around supportive cultures, creating time with family and a level playing field for professional development.

December 12, 2016 (San Francisco, Calif.) – For a significant share of employees, Mom or Dad is the most important job title they'll ever hold. They care about working for a company that honors their family commitments, while their employers must meet the needs of team members with children to retain the best talent. With these important personal and business goals in mind, research and consulting firm Great Place to Work and Fortune are proud to announce this year's ranking of the country's Best Workplaces for Parents.

We analyzed surveys from more than 120,000 co-workers with children, scrutinizing their organizations for the career characteristics that support working parents. These include the availability of specific programs, like parental leave and child care. At the same time, the winning companies also showed much smaller gaps between parents and non-parents when it came to questions surrounding professional development, management fairness, team camaraderie and other elements essential to a high-trust, high-performance workplace culture.

"There's obviously much more to being a parent than giving birth. Likewise, it takes more than family leave to create an outstanding workplace for employees with children," said Michael C. Bush, CEO of Great Place to Work. “Many companies that we survey have innovative family leave offerings. The Best Workplaces for Parents stand above their peers by offering team members a high-trust environment where they feel confident that, if they use these offerings, it will not limit their advancement or growth opportunities in any way. In lower-trust environments, our data has shown that there is often a reluctance to use 'unlimited maternity/paternity leave' or other innovative offerings, because there is not yet evidence that a parent can use these policies and not 'lose' in some way. In a high-trust environment – like the companies on our list – these concerns are not present.”

By creating a credible, caring work environment for all employees, these organizations also have found meaningful ways to support the parents among their ranks:

Starting in 2017, Ernst & Young will offer up to $25,000 in financial assistance for adoptions, as well as for advanced reproductive health procedures that include surrogacy and medically necessary egg and sperm freezing.

At Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, an emphasis on advancement extends to employees' children. The company sends a congratulatory note from the CEO, along with a gift card, to all honor-roll students who are the children of hourly workers.

Ultimate Software recognizes that parents with older children often ring up hefty bills for their after-school pursuits. The company provides $300 per child, per year to help cover the cost of sports and other extracurricular activities.

Compared to their peers of similar size, the Best Workplaces were the most admired by parents working at Great Place to Work-Certified™ companies. The winners also stood out for the ways they help meet the unique challenges faced by families welcoming a new baby:

Companies on the list offered an average of 63 days of paid maternity leave, with their new mothers taking an average of 67 days off.

Paid paternity leave among the winners averaged 30 days, with new dads taking an average of 20 days off.

The Best Workplaces also offered an average of 43 days of PTO for adoptions.

The Best Workplaces for Parents is one of a series of rankings by Great Place to Work and Fortune based on employee survey feedback from Great Place to Work–Certified organizations.

To determine the winners, Great Place to Work analyzed how positively mothers and fathers experienced their workplace overall, paying special attention to an index of factors where parents tended to have a less-positive experience than colleagues without children. The ranking also takes into account how favorably parents experience their workplace relative to colleagues without children, as well as the availability and generosity of maternity and paternity leave programs, adoption support and childcare programs. Organizations needed to have at least 50 employees to be considered and were compared to peers of similar size.

Great Place to Work

Great Place to Work® is a global people analytics and consulting firm that helps companies of all sizes produce better business results by focusing on the work experience for every employee—our research shows there’s a clear and direct relationship between employee engagement and financial performance. Over the past 30 years, we have surveyed more than 100 million employees to help organizations around the world identify and build high-trust, high-performance workplace cultures. Powered by decades of research, Emprising®, our Software-as-a-Service survey and analytics platform, empowers companies with access to the assessments, data, and real-time reporting needed to help them create a meaningful impact on their business, their people, and their culture. Through our certification programs, we recognize outstanding workplaces and produce Fortune’s annual list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For, as well as a variety of other Best Workplace rankings in the United States and in more than 60 other countries. Everything we do is driven by our mission: to build a better world by helping every organization become a Great Place to Work For All by the year 2030.